So I was supposed to run a Samhain ritual for our sabbat group (it's not really a circle, much less a coven, but since we're not really associated with a specific UU church anymore it feels weird to call us a CUUPs circle, even if we are still loosely affiliated with the national group) on Monday. Since that was the full moon, I cancelled my moon circle for this month. I didn't spend as much time and energy writing the ritual as I'd originally intended, but it was a substantial amount - and then no one showed up but me and the hosts. Three's not really enough for bells, whistles, and candles (or is that book, bell, and whistle?), so we decided to just do a basic dumb supper instead. It was nice, but not very ritual-y.
I then debated trying to run the ritual tonight instead, but it seemed unlikely that I could get enough people together on such short notice. So instead, I have candles and incense burning at my tiny ancestor stele. Tomorrow, I'll put out fresh candles and incense, and the bourbon they asked for. (I still don't have any tobacco - I think I'll have to find a pipe store, or maybe a botanica.)
One of the people who missed the Monday ritual is attending on a very elderly relative in the hospital. One of the people who did make it recently lost a sister to the Great Below. A friend of a friend has had a stroke and can't communicate to her caretakers to get her priestess for what might be her last rites. My own grandmother died a few days after a Samhain. And, of course, the latest incarnation of Huracan is making a deadly pass across the eastern seaboard. It is definitely the dark half of the year.
Blessed Samhain, Winterfinding, and/or Dia de los Muertos to all of you.
Wednesday, October 31, 2012
Sunday, August 12, 2012
Ripples
Amazon had a sale on Grateful Dead MP3s recently, so I picked up a best-of. I'm not a huge fan, and never have been, but I like them well enough, and - more to the point - I hang out with enough musicians that eventually, someone is going to ask me to sing "Uncle John's Band" while they jam out. It's kind of like "Hey Jude" that way - everyone knows it, no matter what their normal musical style is.
On a parallel track, I also recently, as a fumbling way of completing an assignment I was given, ended up constructing a small ancestral shrine. (I also dropped a cinder of burning frankincense, and melted a hole in a plastic pot before I noticed. Fortunately, it was on concrete and I had a watering can at hand, so no harm done except to the pot.) It's a eclectic, or possibly syncretic, hodgepodge of elements. The central piece is a small cedar stela, marked with a solar winged disc (a symbol for Shapshu of the Corpses, one of the Ugaritic protectors of the dead), an eight-pointed star (specifically Astarte's symbol, but it shows up a lot in Levantine and Mesopotamian religious art in the context of various heavenly deities, not just Astarte/Ishtar), and the names of both of my paternal grandparents. It's currently flanked by two jar candles (the sort you see in the Hispanic foods section of the grocery store, with various saints on them), and has a spot for incense in front of the stela (stick incense, now, after the goof with the resin incense). I need to see if I have any photos I can scan and print to add, at least temporarily.
I don't normally do a lot of regular ancestor veneration; I've historically avoided it on the grounds that it would be disrespectful to my ancestors' beliefs. This is particularly true on my distaff side, unfortunately; every ancestor for whom I know more than a name was a rock-ribbed devout Lutheran, and the same will be true of my mother when she joins them. I am fairly sure that, even if they have found out by now that there is more than they imagined, they would still be grossly offended by being offered veneration due (in their minds) only to their god. And my father's father's line runs to standard Southern Protestantism, although they seem to have been generally less devout than my maternal side.
But my father's mother's side is Catholic, and Louisiana Catholics at that. My paternal grandmother was a fairly devout Marian; I trace some of my initial respect for the female Divine to her reverence for the Mother of God. She was also a bit of a drama queen and attention-seeking scene-stealer. At some point in my contemplation of the assignment, I realized that, orthodoxy or not, anything that involved someone making a big fuss about her, in Mary's name, would probably not displease her. And her husband lost whatever vestiges of his childhood Presbyterian faith he still had on the battlefield in WWII; he might dismiss the whole project as foolishness and nonsense, but he wouldn't find it offensive in the same way that my two-church-founding, organ-playing, Bible-loving maternal grandfather would. So - fair enough. There's a Virgin of Guadalupe candle for her, and a plain red candle for him.
So what happens? They complain that I didn't get them tobacco and bourbon instead of incense.
*facepalm* Talk about your ungrateful dead!
But then, why should they be any different in death than in life? And, at least they turned up. And - well, they're right; they were both smokers and social drinkers all their lives, and part of ancestor reverence is to get them what they want(ed). And I can get them tobacco and bourbon, even if I don't remember their brand (and they get pipe tobacco; I am not buying them cigarettes).
On a parallel track, I also recently, as a fumbling way of completing an assignment I was given, ended up constructing a small ancestral shrine. (I also dropped a cinder of burning frankincense, and melted a hole in a plastic pot before I noticed. Fortunately, it was on concrete and I had a watering can at hand, so no harm done except to the pot.) It's a eclectic, or possibly syncretic, hodgepodge of elements. The central piece is a small cedar stela, marked with a solar winged disc (a symbol for Shapshu of the Corpses, one of the Ugaritic protectors of the dead), an eight-pointed star (specifically Astarte's symbol, but it shows up a lot in Levantine and Mesopotamian religious art in the context of various heavenly deities, not just Astarte/Ishtar), and the names of both of my paternal grandparents. It's currently flanked by two jar candles (the sort you see in the Hispanic foods section of the grocery store, with various saints on them), and has a spot for incense in front of the stela (stick incense, now, after the goof with the resin incense). I need to see if I have any photos I can scan and print to add, at least temporarily.
I don't normally do a lot of regular ancestor veneration; I've historically avoided it on the grounds that it would be disrespectful to my ancestors' beliefs. This is particularly true on my distaff side, unfortunately; every ancestor for whom I know more than a name was a rock-ribbed devout Lutheran, and the same will be true of my mother when she joins them. I am fairly sure that, even if they have found out by now that there is more than they imagined, they would still be grossly offended by being offered veneration due (in their minds) only to their god. And my father's father's line runs to standard Southern Protestantism, although they seem to have been generally less devout than my maternal side.
But my father's mother's side is Catholic, and Louisiana Catholics at that. My paternal grandmother was a fairly devout Marian; I trace some of my initial respect for the female Divine to her reverence for the Mother of God. She was also a bit of a drama queen and attention-seeking scene-stealer. At some point in my contemplation of the assignment, I realized that, orthodoxy or not, anything that involved someone making a big fuss about her, in Mary's name, would probably not displease her. And her husband lost whatever vestiges of his childhood Presbyterian faith he still had on the battlefield in WWII; he might dismiss the whole project as foolishness and nonsense, but he wouldn't find it offensive in the same way that my two-church-founding, organ-playing, Bible-loving maternal grandfather would. So - fair enough. There's a Virgin of Guadalupe candle for her, and a plain red candle for him.
So what happens? They complain that I didn't get them tobacco and bourbon instead of incense.
*facepalm* Talk about your ungrateful dead!
But then, why should they be any different in death than in life? And, at least they turned up. And - well, they're right; they were both smokers and social drinkers all their lives, and part of ancestor reverence is to get them what they want(ed). And I can get them tobacco and bourbon, even if I don't remember their brand (and they get pipe tobacco; I am not buying them cigarettes).
Friday, August 3, 2012
Taking Our Chances
Pretty much everyone who's had much exposure to Christianity has probably heard of Pascal's Wager. You may not know what he knew a thing or two about wagering; he's not the father of mathematical probability - that distinction goes to Fermat - but he was instrumental in developing it beyond its initial foundations.
In case you don't know Pascal's Wager, it goes something like this: Either God exists, or he does not. Either you believe, or you do not. If God does not exist and you do not believe, nothing happens. If God does not exist and you do believe, you miss out on some of the joys and pleasures of this world. If God exists and you do not believe, you will be tortured for all eternity. If God exists and you do believe, you will exist in eternal bliss. Since the reward for believing if God exists is essentially positive-infinity, and the reward for not believing if God exists is negative infinity, it doesn't matter what the payoffs are if God does not exist; as long as the probability that God exists is not zero, the rational thing is to choose to believe.
Now, there are a lot of problems with that, starting with the question of whether one can, in fact, choose to believe (Calvin had some opinions on that subject). The biggest objection brought by most mathematicians is that Christianity and atheism are not the only two options - Islam is usually brought up, and sometimes Hinduism and Buddhism as well.
It turns out that there's a Pagan version of the wager, which in at least some form predates Pascal by quite a bit; it's sometimes known as the skeptic's wager, but it stems at least in part from the Roman emperor Marcus Aurelius (thanks to Libby Anne for this particular formulation), so I'm going to call it Aurelius's wager.
And Aurelius's Wager goes something like this: Either the gods exist, or they don't. Either the gods are just, or they are unjust. We may act with justice, or with injustice. If the gods exist and are just, then we will be judged according to whether we have been just or unjust. If the gods exist and are unjust, then we should not care what they think. If the gods do not exist, and we act unjustly, then we will be remembered with infamy. If the gods do not exist and we act justly, then we will at least be remembered well.
Note that Pascal's wager is actually covered in Aurelius's. A god who is capable of inflicting a non-finite punishment on a finite being, and does so, is clearly not a just god. Indeed, if a god did so, the just thing to do would be to either struggle against it, not to serve it. As Huck Finn said, "All right, then I'll go to Hell."
Star Foster wrote yesterday about rejecting Jesus Christ. I actually have a bit of a soft spot for the rabbi Yeheshua ben Miriam; for a man of his time, he was remarkably progressive. I think his followers were far more mired in conventional thinking, and the religion they founded got co-opted by the Empire a couple of centuries after Aurelius. But I have no love whatsoever for Yahveh, and the above is part of it. I have absolutely no way to square Yahveh's behavior with a just god, no matter how his prophets attempted to spin him later. So - I will not worship him, in any form. If you go back far enough, to before Yahveh and El were syncretized, I will happily worship the physical, fallible El who loves humans and is concerned with (although not perfect about) justice. I have no problem with Mary Theotokos, and the deified version of her kid I can take or leave, depending on the context. But Yahveh the Lonely, the Angry? The sky-father who divorced Asherah and disowned Baal? No, not him.
I've actually had this argument with a couple of atheists. They wanted to know what would happen if, as Yahveh did to Abraham, one of my gods told me to sacrifice someone. They seemed to be startled when I told them "I'd say no," as if accepting a god's existence meant always obeying it. But I agree with Aurelius - an unjust god is not worth obeying. (I'll admit, the fact that I think the gods have a fairly limited influence on one's afterlife also helps.)
In case you don't know Pascal's Wager, it goes something like this: Either God exists, or he does not. Either you believe, or you do not. If God does not exist and you do not believe, nothing happens. If God does not exist and you do believe, you miss out on some of the joys and pleasures of this world. If God exists and you do not believe, you will be tortured for all eternity. If God exists and you do believe, you will exist in eternal bliss. Since the reward for believing if God exists is essentially positive-infinity, and the reward for not believing if God exists is negative infinity, it doesn't matter what the payoffs are if God does not exist; as long as the probability that God exists is not zero, the rational thing is to choose to believe.
Now, there are a lot of problems with that, starting with the question of whether one can, in fact, choose to believe (Calvin had some opinions on that subject). The biggest objection brought by most mathematicians is that Christianity and atheism are not the only two options - Islam is usually brought up, and sometimes Hinduism and Buddhism as well.
It turns out that there's a Pagan version of the wager, which in at least some form predates Pascal by quite a bit; it's sometimes known as the skeptic's wager, but it stems at least in part from the Roman emperor Marcus Aurelius (thanks to Libby Anne for this particular formulation), so I'm going to call it Aurelius's wager.
And Aurelius's Wager goes something like this: Either the gods exist, or they don't. Either the gods are just, or they are unjust. We may act with justice, or with injustice. If the gods exist and are just, then we will be judged according to whether we have been just or unjust. If the gods exist and are unjust, then we should not care what they think. If the gods do not exist, and we act unjustly, then we will be remembered with infamy. If the gods do not exist and we act justly, then we will at least be remembered well.
Note that Pascal's wager is actually covered in Aurelius's. A god who is capable of inflicting a non-finite punishment on a finite being, and does so, is clearly not a just god. Indeed, if a god did so, the just thing to do would be to either struggle against it, not to serve it. As Huck Finn said, "All right, then I'll go to Hell."
Star Foster wrote yesterday about rejecting Jesus Christ. I actually have a bit of a soft spot for the rabbi Yeheshua ben Miriam; for a man of his time, he was remarkably progressive. I think his followers were far more mired in conventional thinking, and the religion they founded got co-opted by the Empire a couple of centuries after Aurelius. But I have no love whatsoever for Yahveh, and the above is part of it. I have absolutely no way to square Yahveh's behavior with a just god, no matter how his prophets attempted to spin him later. So - I will not worship him, in any form. If you go back far enough, to before Yahveh and El were syncretized, I will happily worship the physical, fallible El who loves humans and is concerned with (although not perfect about) justice. I have no problem with Mary Theotokos, and the deified version of her kid I can take or leave, depending on the context. But Yahveh the Lonely, the Angry? The sky-father who divorced Asherah and disowned Baal? No, not him.
I've actually had this argument with a couple of atheists. They wanted to know what would happen if, as Yahveh did to Abraham, one of my gods told me to sacrifice someone. They seemed to be startled when I told them "I'd say no," as if accepting a god's existence meant always obeying it. But I agree with Aurelius - an unjust god is not worth obeying. (I'll admit, the fact that I think the gods have a fairly limited influence on one's afterlife also helps.)
Friday, July 20, 2012
Given For You
A number of people in the broader Pagan blogging community, especially those who identify as polytheists rather than pantheists or duotheists, have been talking about "daily practice" as a discipline lately. Most of them seem to mean something like "daily prayer and/or meditation" by this.
I'm not sure I think that's necessary. I'm tempted to say I don't think it's historically accurate, at least in that it's generally pictured as daily private practice. Most daily prayers, poems, and hymns in the historical Pagan eras were done quite publicly, in temples or their courtyards, in shrines, and in theaters.
What you and your deities come to an agreement on is, of course, between you and them - P. Sufenas Virius Lupus has a great post up on this. If that means singing a daily hymn, or meditating for ten minutes every morning and every evening, then great! But I don't think it looks much like what the gods have traditionally asked for.
It seems to me that what most historical Pagan traditions had instead was regular (not necessarily daily) sacrifice, and other similar ritual actions (such as decorating the votive statuary for a particular deity). I personally find it more meaningful to offer libations and incense to my broad polypantheon of deities on something resembling a semi-regular basis. While I see myself as needing improvement here, it's more of a matter of getting a better schedule together and determining what the likes and dislikes of each deity are.
None of this is meant to downplay poetry, hymnody, or prayer. I've commented multiple times that I think we need more Pagan hymns - we have plenty of chants, and those serve many admirable purposes, but they don't replace longer-form songs, and we don't have enough. And I'd like to see more for individual deities, more than generic Goddess-hymns, although I'd like to see those too.
Beyond that is the matter of honoring one's ancestors. I have a hard time with this, partly because my mother-line ancestors are all hardcore Lutherans and would have the taciturn and stoic equivalent of a major hissy at the idea of being the recipient of veneration. There are similar issues with my father-line ancestors, although the immediate past two, my paternal grandparents, are pretty much okay with it from what I can tell so far. It's not that I don't want to - it's that I'm not entirely convinced I wouldn't be doing so against most of their wills. So far, I've mostly been going on the "should you choose to receive these offerings" model, which has not gotten me much in the way of results one way or the other.
At least the ancestors don't need more than household shrines. I am still awkwardly aware that most of the historical praxis for my gods assumes public shrines at a minimum, and in most cases public temples. And I don't know if we'll ever have that again - at best, I can imagine grounds owned by Pagan organizations with places for small, permanent shrines and shared larger ritual spaces. I suppose part of being NeoPagan is learning anew how to respect the gods as a religious minority in a larger culture. That we tend not to be wealthy doesn't help. And "appreciate the journey" has never been very satisfactory for me.
I'm not sure I think that's necessary. I'm tempted to say I don't think it's historically accurate, at least in that it's generally pictured as daily private practice. Most daily prayers, poems, and hymns in the historical Pagan eras were done quite publicly, in temples or their courtyards, in shrines, and in theaters.
What you and your deities come to an agreement on is, of course, between you and them - P. Sufenas Virius Lupus has a great post up on this. If that means singing a daily hymn, or meditating for ten minutes every morning and every evening, then great! But I don't think it looks much like what the gods have traditionally asked for.
It seems to me that what most historical Pagan traditions had instead was regular (not necessarily daily) sacrifice, and other similar ritual actions (such as decorating the votive statuary for a particular deity). I personally find it more meaningful to offer libations and incense to my broad polypantheon of deities on something resembling a semi-regular basis. While I see myself as needing improvement here, it's more of a matter of getting a better schedule together and determining what the likes and dislikes of each deity are.
None of this is meant to downplay poetry, hymnody, or prayer. I've commented multiple times that I think we need more Pagan hymns - we have plenty of chants, and those serve many admirable purposes, but they don't replace longer-form songs, and we don't have enough. And I'd like to see more for individual deities, more than generic Goddess-hymns, although I'd like to see those too.
Beyond that is the matter of honoring one's ancestors. I have a hard time with this, partly because my mother-line ancestors are all hardcore Lutherans and would have the taciturn and stoic equivalent of a major hissy at the idea of being the recipient of veneration. There are similar issues with my father-line ancestors, although the immediate past two, my paternal grandparents, are pretty much okay with it from what I can tell so far. It's not that I don't want to - it's that I'm not entirely convinced I wouldn't be doing so against most of their wills. So far, I've mostly been going on the "should you choose to receive these offerings" model, which has not gotten me much in the way of results one way or the other.
At least the ancestors don't need more than household shrines. I am still awkwardly aware that most of the historical praxis for my gods assumes public shrines at a minimum, and in most cases public temples. And I don't know if we'll ever have that again - at best, I can imagine grounds owned by Pagan organizations with places for small, permanent shrines and shared larger ritual spaces. I suppose part of being NeoPagan is learning anew how to respect the gods as a religious minority in a larger culture. That we tend not to be wealthy doesn't help. And "appreciate the journey" has never been very satisfactory for me.
Tuesday, July 17, 2012
Mud and Storm
It's supposed to rain roughly every other day here from about mid-June to about mid-July, from about 4 pm until shortly after sunset. The oppressive heat of the day evaporates the water from the Gulf, it drifts over land and starts condensing as it hits the cooler upper air, and we get our daily 60% chance of late afternoon and evening thundershowers.
It didn't do that last year, because there was a massive high stuck over the entire state of Texas all summer, and we had a ridiculous drought with wildfires instead. (Actually, the drought had already started the previous winter, but no one noticed because we were all complaining that it was so damn cold.) It's not doing it this year, either. June was pretty hot and dry, pushing us into mild drought again. Starting about a week and a half ago, though, we started getting daily thunderstorms - but at 4 in the morning instead of four in the afternoon. They've slowly drifted forward (along with my sleep cycle) over the course of the last week or so; today's just started at around 3 pm (and in fact blipped the power while I was typing this).
And then, every few years, Huracan roars out of the Gulf to remind us who's boss around here. His last incarnation was named Ike. The laws of probability are such that saying we're due for another visit is wrong, and we've had a quiet Atlantic hurricane season so far, despite the Gulf being quite hot - probably because the prime storm-formation area off of Africa is only average temperature-wise, and there's rather a lot of dry air floating around to inhibit storm formation.
(Note: I got interrupted for about 45 minutes here by a lightning-related power outage.)
One of the reasons, I suspect, that I've been feeling the pull of the Levantine pantheon is that tension between the desert behind, the storm above, and the sea before. The association of Asherah with the sea, vague as it is based on our current sources, matches some of my other sea-deity associations, and of course the defeat of Sea at the hands of Storm is more palatable when Storm is in turn bested by Desert (who then has to be defeated by the Lady of the Beasts to revive the Storm, another note missing from the Babylonian version of the story). Before I came to Texas, the desert was a far-away threat, even farther away than the mountains, but now, desert and ocean alike are only a few hours' drive away. One or another may encroach for a summer (especially when we humans have been feeding them so poorly; the fumes of internal combustion only stoke their fury), only to die at the hands of another and return on the next wheel of the year.
Io, Ba'al Hadad! May you keep drought away from our doorstep a little longer.
It didn't do that last year, because there was a massive high stuck over the entire state of Texas all summer, and we had a ridiculous drought with wildfires instead. (Actually, the drought had already started the previous winter, but no one noticed because we were all complaining that it was so damn cold.) It's not doing it this year, either. June was pretty hot and dry, pushing us into mild drought again. Starting about a week and a half ago, though, we started getting daily thunderstorms - but at 4 in the morning instead of four in the afternoon. They've slowly drifted forward (along with my sleep cycle) over the course of the last week or so; today's just started at around 3 pm (and in fact blipped the power while I was typing this).
And then, every few years, Huracan roars out of the Gulf to remind us who's boss around here. His last incarnation was named Ike. The laws of probability are such that saying we're due for another visit is wrong, and we've had a quiet Atlantic hurricane season so far, despite the Gulf being quite hot - probably because the prime storm-formation area off of Africa is only average temperature-wise, and there's rather a lot of dry air floating around to inhibit storm formation.
(Note: I got interrupted for about 45 minutes here by a lightning-related power outage.)
One of the reasons, I suspect, that I've been feeling the pull of the Levantine pantheon is that tension between the desert behind, the storm above, and the sea before. The association of Asherah with the sea, vague as it is based on our current sources, matches some of my other sea-deity associations, and of course the defeat of Sea at the hands of Storm is more palatable when Storm is in turn bested by Desert (who then has to be defeated by the Lady of the Beasts to revive the Storm, another note missing from the Babylonian version of the story). Before I came to Texas, the desert was a far-away threat, even farther away than the mountains, but now, desert and ocean alike are only a few hours' drive away. One or another may encroach for a summer (especially when we humans have been feeding them so poorly; the fumes of internal combustion only stoke their fury), only to die at the hands of another and return on the next wheel of the year.
Io, Ba'al Hadad! May you keep drought away from our doorstep a little longer.
Thursday, July 12, 2012
People of the Library
I am starting to be concerned about the number of books I am buying.
Not, let me assure anyone, for financial reasons - while none of my hobbies are cheap, we are a DINK household, and I can easily decide to buy less yarn and more books (or fewer books and more beads, or any one of a number of other swaps) in a given month. It's more a matter of space. Our apartment is really the bottom half of an eighty-year-old house, and while it's quite generous for what we're paying, space is still somewhat limited. In particular, I'm about to start having to stack the bookshelves in my study double-deep, as I don't have the space to buy another bookshelf.
Someone out there is suggesting that I thin the stacks and haul the books I don't need to the local used bookstore. It's true that there are several books on the shelves, mostly dating from my just-post-college dalliance with dualistic Dianic Wicca by way of feminist religion, that I probably will neither read again nor use as reference, and I could stand to get rid of them - but Mary Daly and Carol Christ, though I never really agreed with the first and often disagree with the monist tendencies of the latter, are both huge influences in my sorting-out period, when I set Yahveh down and began deciding what my theology actually looked like. I'm not sure I want to part with those. I do have a stack of books that need to be donated, but most of them are the leftovers from several donations I got from other people who were moving, simplifying, or cleaning out after a death in the family, and most of them have to do with either cooking or kinky sex rather than religion. (In both cases, it's not that I don't like the books as that the specific flavors aren't quite to my taste. I am having much better luck finding cookbooks that fit my rather particular palate than kink books. But I digress.)
No, the big reason for the sudden explosion of text is that I've been digging into what we know historically about the ancient Near East and its religions, including a few forays into the Hellenized and Roman periods, and quite a few of the books I want on the topic (a) aren't available as ebooks, and (b) are in fact out of print. So in many cases, it's a simple matter of having to grab them now or waiting until later, when they might not be available at all and will very probably be more expensive if they are. That many of these were either explicitly textbooks or apparently assigned reading in some college courses means that there's the weird predatory business of used textbooks rattling around as well.
I wish publishers would quit writhing around about the business models for ebooks - no, it's not fair that Amazon and Apple and Barnes & Noble get to jack you around like this, but if you'd gotten on the stick earlier, you'd be more in control of your own electronic publication and distribution, and you didn't, so take your spanking from the Invisible Hand of the Market and deal with it like big boys and girls. There's really no reason for anything to ever go "out of print" in electronic form when "printing" is a matter of file transfer. In fact, publishers and authors lose sales when things go out of print, and if there's no loss in paper, ink, transportation, & storage costs, there's no reason to ever lose that sale. It's the cost of the physical object and its maintenance that's the weight on the publisher's shoulders, and on my bending bookshelves.
The paper-lovers are having a fit out there. Well, I love the feel and heft and smell of a proper paper book, too - and reading a paper book during a power outage is certainly easier. There is certainly much to worry about as far as proprietary file types and device obsolescence go, too - but I think those concerns are somewhat overblown. Paper books have their own planned obsolescence, too; it's just longer. I've had cheap paperbacks from the '60s and hardbacks from the '40s disintegrate in my hands. Sure, most printers use better paper now (which is one reason books are so dang expensive), but no book will last forever, and most of them won't outlive their owners by more than a generation. I've had a housefire. The documents that were on my hard drive mostly (not all - there was some damage) survived. The books that were in the room where the fire started did not.
Have you ever seen a burned book? I have. It burns from the outside in. I have picked up what looked like bricks of charcoal, opened them, and seen perfectly readable text in the middle. The information was all still there, just as it is in the closed book on the shelf - but the act of reading it crumbled the medium under my fingers. If I had had cloud backups, if they'd been on the e-reader (which I didn't have yet) in my backpack (which was with me, and thus not in the room that burned), if the information had lived in more than one place, I'd've still had those books. I've never personally lost a book to water, but I've seen seen piles of mildewed paperbacks sitting on street corners for pickup after Ike, after every flood. Digital isn't an ideal solution, but paper isn't as permanent as you think.
I'd love to relieve my groaning shelves and fill some digital library, backed up on device and server and thumb drive, such that every new purchase only added a few hundred K to drives that can store millions, billions. I don't want the shelves empty - I just wish the nature of the business wasn't such that having too many interests left them overcrowded.
Not, let me assure anyone, for financial reasons - while none of my hobbies are cheap, we are a DINK household, and I can easily decide to buy less yarn and more books (or fewer books and more beads, or any one of a number of other swaps) in a given month. It's more a matter of space. Our apartment is really the bottom half of an eighty-year-old house, and while it's quite generous for what we're paying, space is still somewhat limited. In particular, I'm about to start having to stack the bookshelves in my study double-deep, as I don't have the space to buy another bookshelf.
Someone out there is suggesting that I thin the stacks and haul the books I don't need to the local used bookstore. It's true that there are several books on the shelves, mostly dating from my just-post-college dalliance with dualistic Dianic Wicca by way of feminist religion, that I probably will neither read again nor use as reference, and I could stand to get rid of them - but Mary Daly and Carol Christ, though I never really agreed with the first and often disagree with the monist tendencies of the latter, are both huge influences in my sorting-out period, when I set Yahveh down and began deciding what my theology actually looked like. I'm not sure I want to part with those. I do have a stack of books that need to be donated, but most of them are the leftovers from several donations I got from other people who were moving, simplifying, or cleaning out after a death in the family, and most of them have to do with either cooking or kinky sex rather than religion. (In both cases, it's not that I don't like the books as that the specific flavors aren't quite to my taste. I am having much better luck finding cookbooks that fit my rather particular palate than kink books. But I digress.)
No, the big reason for the sudden explosion of text is that I've been digging into what we know historically about the ancient Near East and its religions, including a few forays into the Hellenized and Roman periods, and quite a few of the books I want on the topic (a) aren't available as ebooks, and (b) are in fact out of print. So in many cases, it's a simple matter of having to grab them now or waiting until later, when they might not be available at all and will very probably be more expensive if they are. That many of these were either explicitly textbooks or apparently assigned reading in some college courses means that there's the weird predatory business of used textbooks rattling around as well.
I wish publishers would quit writhing around about the business models for ebooks - no, it's not fair that Amazon and Apple and Barnes & Noble get to jack you around like this, but if you'd gotten on the stick earlier, you'd be more in control of your own electronic publication and distribution, and you didn't, so take your spanking from the Invisible Hand of the Market and deal with it like big boys and girls. There's really no reason for anything to ever go "out of print" in electronic form when "printing" is a matter of file transfer. In fact, publishers and authors lose sales when things go out of print, and if there's no loss in paper, ink, transportation, & storage costs, there's no reason to ever lose that sale. It's the cost of the physical object and its maintenance that's the weight on the publisher's shoulders, and on my bending bookshelves.
The paper-lovers are having a fit out there. Well, I love the feel and heft and smell of a proper paper book, too - and reading a paper book during a power outage is certainly easier. There is certainly much to worry about as far as proprietary file types and device obsolescence go, too - but I think those concerns are somewhat overblown. Paper books have their own planned obsolescence, too; it's just longer. I've had cheap paperbacks from the '60s and hardbacks from the '40s disintegrate in my hands. Sure, most printers use better paper now (which is one reason books are so dang expensive), but no book will last forever, and most of them won't outlive their owners by more than a generation. I've had a housefire. The documents that were on my hard drive mostly (not all - there was some damage) survived. The books that were in the room where the fire started did not.
Have you ever seen a burned book? I have. It burns from the outside in. I have picked up what looked like bricks of charcoal, opened them, and seen perfectly readable text in the middle. The information was all still there, just as it is in the closed book on the shelf - but the act of reading it crumbled the medium under my fingers. If I had had cloud backups, if they'd been on the e-reader (which I didn't have yet) in my backpack (which was with me, and thus not in the room that burned), if the information had lived in more than one place, I'd've still had those books. I've never personally lost a book to water, but I've seen seen piles of mildewed paperbacks sitting on street corners for pickup after Ike, after every flood. Digital isn't an ideal solution, but paper isn't as permanent as you think.
I'd love to relieve my groaning shelves and fill some digital library, backed up on device and server and thumb drive, such that every new purchase only added a few hundred K to drives that can store millions, billions. I don't want the shelves empty - I just wish the nature of the business wasn't such that having too many interests left them overcrowded.
Monday, July 2, 2012
Ave Discordia
A number of my friends are Discordians. (I almost started with "some of my best friends are Discordians," but let's not go there, mm?) Both the Spouse and my next-closest male friend identify as such, the first fairly casually, the other as seriously as one can and still be what he considers a proper Discordian (which is never more than ha-ha-only-serious).
In my recent fumblings in Near-Eastern historical paganism, one thing that I've found is that various deities of the underworld - Nergal and Ereshkigal, Reshep, Shapshu-Pagri, etc. - have rites and sacrifices, but Death itself - Mot, in the Canaanite literature - does not. Even when Death is figured as a deity, and is mentioned (usually as an antagonist) in the myth-cycles, It's not actively worshipped, perhaps out of a sense that we will all offer It a great enough sacrifice eventually, or perhaps out of a more pragmatic idea that it's not a good idea to invite Its full attention to one's-self.
Personally, I generally feel much the same way about the gods and goddesses of discord. I understand why others might not, and I certainly understand the urge to worship trickster-deities of various sorts. I confess to being confused when my Discordian friends frame Eris that way, though, as that's not really a role She plays in any of the extant myths. I am also perplexed by those who claim to worship "chaos" by way of Discordia, as Kaos is a deity in Its own right in the Theogony. As a worshipper of Tiamat, aka the Tohu half of Tohu-wa-Bohu (and yes, for those of you who play AD&D, the second half of that is related to Bahamut, go give yourself a d20-shaped cookie), I grok worshipping the primeval chaos at the base of all things. But that's not the same thing as discord. Chaos is the wellspring of good order; it comes first and gives form to it. Discord breaks already-existing good order. (It also breaks bad order, and I do understand that that's a major part of the appeal, but we'll leave that aside for the moment.)
Someone out there may be scratching their head as to how I can honor Tiamat and be leery of Discordia. Part of it has to do with how dead gods work, which is different from how gods of the underworld or gods of death work (and now all three of them are running around this post!), and part of it is the difference between the cosmic and cthonic, on the one hand, and the human scale and the social, on the other. The second is far more dangerous, for me. Tiamat was involved in only one war, and She didn't start it; Eris started the Trojan war, and has been part of every one ever since, even though she's not fundamentally a war goddess.
I understand acknowledging Discord, on the grounds that not inviting Her to the feast attracts Her attention in a worse way than inviting Her. In that She is more perceptive than Mot, she requires more attention to keep Her happy, and satiating Her is not so costly. But, despite the fact that She is Matron to the two most important men in my life, I don't understand the attraction beyond that. (In one case, he feels that She chose him rather than the other way around, and given his relationships with mortal women, that does match a recurring pattern in his life, albeit one that I think is perhaps a bit unhealthy.)
It turns out (despite the fact that He is a trickster, and a fine one, as well as being a deity of discord, lies, and perhaps betrayal, although some of that may be spin from the Christian monks who wrote many of the myths down) that many Heathens have the same reaction to Loki that I do to Eris. There also seems to be some question as to whether the pre-Christian Heathens actually did Him honor or not, and therefore whether it is appropriate for modern Heathens to do so. There was apparently some controversy about this at this year's Trothmoot. I get this, although the fact that He has a more broad purview than She does makes me more willing to deal with Him personally, and less confused about why anyone who had a choice about it would choose Him. In response to the controversy, some of his devotees are organizing a Month for Loki to blog about, and otherwise honor, Him. I get this, too - if you do honor Him, and he's been cut out of a central rite, it only stand to reason to honor Him on the peripheries.
Of course, Loki has recently sprung into the broad popular culture, too, via his comic-book-cum-movie fictionalized form in the Avengers movie (and the Thor movie before that), with the highly-attractive and expressive visage of Tom Hiddleston. And, true to form, he has deeply divided the fandom into those who woobify him, those who love him evil-laugh-and-all without the woobification, and those who hate him as a character. I find the fact that He has managed to spread discord in two different communities simultaneously, in two vastly different ways and in different forms, perhaps far more amusing than I should.
Ah, well. No need to speak ill of the gods, even if I see my work as opposed to theirs. Hail Loki, and ave Discordia!
In my recent fumblings in Near-Eastern historical paganism, one thing that I've found is that various deities of the underworld - Nergal and Ereshkigal, Reshep, Shapshu-Pagri, etc. - have rites and sacrifices, but Death itself - Mot, in the Canaanite literature - does not. Even when Death is figured as a deity, and is mentioned (usually as an antagonist) in the myth-cycles, It's not actively worshipped, perhaps out of a sense that we will all offer It a great enough sacrifice eventually, or perhaps out of a more pragmatic idea that it's not a good idea to invite Its full attention to one's-self.
Personally, I generally feel much the same way about the gods and goddesses of discord. I understand why others might not, and I certainly understand the urge to worship trickster-deities of various sorts. I confess to being confused when my Discordian friends frame Eris that way, though, as that's not really a role She plays in any of the extant myths. I am also perplexed by those who claim to worship "chaos" by way of Discordia, as Kaos is a deity in Its own right in the Theogony. As a worshipper of Tiamat, aka the Tohu half of Tohu-wa-Bohu (and yes, for those of you who play AD&D, the second half of that is related to Bahamut, go give yourself a d20-shaped cookie), I grok worshipping the primeval chaos at the base of all things. But that's not the same thing as discord. Chaos is the wellspring of good order; it comes first and gives form to it. Discord breaks already-existing good order. (It also breaks bad order, and I do understand that that's a major part of the appeal, but we'll leave that aside for the moment.)
Someone out there may be scratching their head as to how I can honor Tiamat and be leery of Discordia. Part of it has to do with how dead gods work, which is different from how gods of the underworld or gods of death work (and now all three of them are running around this post!), and part of it is the difference between the cosmic and cthonic, on the one hand, and the human scale and the social, on the other. The second is far more dangerous, for me. Tiamat was involved in only one war, and She didn't start it; Eris started the Trojan war, and has been part of every one ever since, even though she's not fundamentally a war goddess.
I understand acknowledging Discord, on the grounds that not inviting Her to the feast attracts Her attention in a worse way than inviting Her. In that She is more perceptive than Mot, she requires more attention to keep Her happy, and satiating Her is not so costly. But, despite the fact that She is Matron to the two most important men in my life, I don't understand the attraction beyond that. (In one case, he feels that She chose him rather than the other way around, and given his relationships with mortal women, that does match a recurring pattern in his life, albeit one that I think is perhaps a bit unhealthy.)
It turns out (despite the fact that He is a trickster, and a fine one, as well as being a deity of discord, lies, and perhaps betrayal, although some of that may be spin from the Christian monks who wrote many of the myths down) that many Heathens have the same reaction to Loki that I do to Eris. There also seems to be some question as to whether the pre-Christian Heathens actually did Him honor or not, and therefore whether it is appropriate for modern Heathens to do so. There was apparently some controversy about this at this year's Trothmoot. I get this, although the fact that He has a more broad purview than She does makes me more willing to deal with Him personally, and less confused about why anyone who had a choice about it would choose Him. In response to the controversy, some of his devotees are organizing a Month for Loki to blog about, and otherwise honor, Him. I get this, too - if you do honor Him, and he's been cut out of a central rite, it only stand to reason to honor Him on the peripheries.
Of course, Loki has recently sprung into the broad popular culture, too, via his comic-book-cum-movie fictionalized form in the Avengers movie (and the Thor movie before that), with the highly-attractive and expressive visage of Tom Hiddleston. And, true to form, he has deeply divided the fandom into those who woobify him, those who love him evil-laugh-and-all without the woobification, and those who hate him as a character. I find the fact that He has managed to spread discord in two different communities simultaneously, in two vastly different ways and in different forms, perhaps far more amusing than I should.
Ah, well. No need to speak ill of the gods, even if I see my work as opposed to theirs. Hail Loki, and ave Discordia!
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